Although children of immigrant origin in many European countries are observed to choose higher levels of education than native-origin peers at similar levels of academic performance, little is known about the outcomes of these high-aspiring choices. Using administrative register data covering all children born in 1994–1995 in Denmark, I examine whether the high-aspiring educational choices of children of immigrants convert into educational success or, conversely, into low grades and increased dropout rates. I find that, compared with children of Danish origin, children of immigrants are not only more likely to enrol in academic upper secondary education but also make more ambitious track and subject choices at this educational level. These ethnic choice effects are particularly pronounced at low levels of academic performance. Applying a counterfactual re-weighting approach, I show that, although ethnic choice effects reduce the ethnic gap in overall attainment of academic upper secondary education, they also widen ethnic gaps in dropout rates and achievement. My findings indicate that high aspirations among ethnic minorities operate as a double-edged sword as they help close the educational gap between them and their native-origin peers but at the cost of inducing academically weaker students to embark on less feasible educational trajectories.

We study the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on children’s academic performance in Denmark 14 months into the pandemic using nationwide and exceptionally rich data on reading test scores and family background (N ≈ 200.000 per year). We find no evidence of any major learning slide. While pupils in grade 8 experienced a three percentile points loss in reading performance, pupils in grades 2 and 4 experienced a learning gain of about five percentile points, possibly resulting from school closures being significantly longer among older (22 weeks) than younger children (eight weeks). Importantly and in contrast to expectations, we find little evidence of widening learning gaps by family background. Still, in grade 8 we see a tendency for gaps by parental income and employment status to widen slightly. Further analyses point to that all of these patterns were already in place a few months into pandemic, suggesting that learning gaps did not widen during the subsequent year in which most of the total lockdown period occurred. We also find some indication that boys and low-performing pupils suffered more from school closures than girls and high-performing pupils, but these differences are minor.

Ill health amongst homeless shelter users is widely explained by substance abuse problems and other risk factors. Nonetheless, for many diseases homelessness poses an additional risk to the health.

We study the overlap in the overall impact of family background on two widely studied labor market outcomes by considering whether brother similarities in occupational status are rooted in the same underlying family characteristics that affect brother similarities in income. We extend previous research using sibling correlations as an omnibus measure of total family background impact on a given outcome by directly quantifying how brother correlations in occupational status and income overlap. We apply a novel variance components model to data from Denmark and the United States, two countries known to follow a contradictory pattern: While income mobility is much lower in the United States, occupational mobility is virtually similar. Apart from confirming this pattern, we find a substantial overlap, around 70 percent, in brother similarities in income and occupational status in both countries. Conventional family background variables account for less than one-fifth of this overlap in each country, suggesting that shared family origins of attainment in these two domains are constituted by largely unknown family characteristics. We speculate what these characteristics might be.

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